Sunday, October 14, 2012

Set Design: Submit Your Pitches!

The results from the survey are in, and the new project is going to be a set design! And you, dear readers, are going to design the core concept of that set. But first, some details:

The set will be standalone. Block design is a significant challenge that I don't want to add to the already massive task of creating a set.

It'll be a large set. Balancing a small standalone set for fun gameplay is something R&D has never managed.

There will be no fixed design team. Anyone is welcome to contribute. If you have friends who are interested in being part of the creation of a new set, please invite them to join in!

We'll finish when we finish. The goals of the exercise are twofold: learn as much as possible about design, and produce as good a final product as possible. We'll set intermediate deadlines along the way to help things keep moving. But there won't be any time where we say, "Well, this is still not quite working, but we need to move on."

The fundamental vision for the set will come from one of you. We're going to have a three round selection process to make sure that our set has the best possible underlying concept. The first round will involve eight set ideas, which will then be narrowed to five, then three.

So if you have an idea for a set, now is your chance to pitch it! Fill out this questionnaire and send it to tweetforcealpha@gmail.com by midnight (Pacific Time) on Saturday, October 20. One pitch per person. (If you have a second amazing idea, mention it in the comments below and try to get somebody else interested enough to pitch it.)

Submit seven designs for common cards which represent some of the basic mechanical themes of your set. All five colors must be represented. You may repeat colors and/or design colorless cards.

Unlike the design challenges I've been running, this process is not a design competition. The Goblin Artisans authors will judge these based on the potential of the set, not on the design skills of the person submitting it. We will ignore problems on individual cards unless they bode ill for the set as a whole.

Furthermore, the subsequent rounds of the set selection process will require designers to work on set concepts that they did not submit. You can't continue to submit cards for your first idea; somebody else has to take over for you. This is because we really want a set idea that's appealing to a lot of our audience, not just one person's brainchild.

Lastly, we're looking for diversity of set ideas. If we get five excellent submissions for a "wedge" set, we'll probably only pick one to publish. So, the sets that get chosen will not necessarily be the best ones; they'll be a selection of eight that showcases as many good options as possible for our readers to choose from.

Now, get designing! And leave random ideas in the comments to help other people get inspired.

personally I went for the Egyptian set, pharaos, a big river 3 kingdoms along its length, desert all around, fighting for control of the rules that govern who gets an afterlife (and what kind of afterlife), and who gets eaten by the Gods bellow.

Are we allowed to talk about our submissions at this early point? I didn't write a flavor paragraph like the one above because I thought the core concept was meant to be short. But I would have. And if we're allowed to comment on our on submissions at this point, I will post it below.

I intended for the core concept to be short. Some people have been writing more, or adding flavor explanations along with cards. It doesn't matter to me; having fewer words to read is nice, and at this early stage, fine details are going to get lost or changed anyway.

I think that bottom-up designs should keep their flavor options open until the mechanics are solidly locked in, so as to avoid imposing unnecessary constraints. During GDS2, I found that this opinion was quite unpopular, but I still believe it to be correct.

"Furthermore, the subsequent rounds of the set selection process will require designers to work on set concepts that they did not submit. You can't continue to submit cards for your first idea; somebody else has to take over for you. This is because we really want a set idea that's appealing to a lot of our audience, not just one person's brainchild."

Does that mean if my set gets chosen as the final version that I can't work on it anymore? Could you please clarify?

I think the idea is that there will be a round of initial proposals (right now) which will be continuously narrowed down through subsequent rounds.

If your initial submission is selected to be carried over into the next round, you'll have to take a break from working on your initial submission and instead submit designs for one of the other submissions. Make sense?

Also, my understanding is that even though you can only make a proposition for your world once, you can keep suggesting things for that world in the comments throughout the selection processes so that other people who want to make subsequent propositions supporting your world can use those suggestions.

Being that this is a standalone set I think we have an opportunity to design a set that could never exist as a block. Ideas and mechanics that don't have enough design space for a block would be perfect for a stand alone set.

A big part of what made Innistrad so awesome was that it explored a well-loved and very deep genre. The core concept of it wasn't "Pre-Industrial Revolution Eastern Europe," it was Horror. While a mechanical basis like "Lands Matter" or a well-loved setting like Arabian Nights can lead to a good set, I suspect the most potential comes from a major genre, like Cowboy Western or Murder Mystery. How do you make a Magic set out of that? Successful answers to hard questions are always compelling.

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We met as competitors and collaborators in the second Great Designer Search. After the contest was over, we decided we still had things to say about designing Magic: the Gathering. So we started a blog.